


a mission of love and death

by hupsoonheng



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Guilt, How Do I Tag, Hurt/Comfort, Long-Term Relationship(s), M/M, Original Character(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Serious Injuries, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 06:17:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8193392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hupsoonheng/pseuds/hupsoonheng
Summary: based on a prompt by shipthroughthepages on tumblr, because i can't do anything quite to the letter. sam finds out that years ago, long before he knew bucky, he delivered an escaping winter soldier right back into his captors' hands. now, driven by both love and guilt, he'll do anything to rectify his mistake—including storming a hydra bunker deep under brooklyn, by himself, without telling anyone.





	

**Author's Note:**

> will i ever stop writing sam having panic attacks? probably never. 
> 
> anyway i've been kind of wanting to write some action, this prompt walked itself across my dash, and while i think it got off to a shaky start i feel alright about how it ends up. i say alright because if i think about it too hard, well—you know it it goes. highly sam-centric because i can't help myself, but i try to keep things balanced anyway. you know, for fairness, or whatever.

_The person who meets you at the checkpoint is a splinter of a man, thin and pointy with cornsilk hair that looks like it was buzzed some two months ago. A whippet turned human. The smile he offers when you approach matches him, showing you the barest slice of teeth and gum. His glasses reflect too much of the sun._

_"We can't thank you enough," he says as your passenger's feet touch down first. You land next, folding your wings neatly into their pack, and then your passenger's hands are still kind of glued to your arms, his eyes as unfocused as when you found him. Riley lands last, more graceful than you without the heavy cargo. The whippet man in his long white jacket leans around the passenger's shoulder from behind, puts his mouth almost against the other man's ear, and says something so low it's imperceptible._

_Whatever he said, though, it works because you're free, and now you have no passenger. Now there's just the man you rescued for SHIELD, with his hollow eyes, ratty long hair, stubbly sunburned face. A metal arm painted with a jaunty Soviet-looking star. He stands as still as if his internal batteries have run dry, right down to the kink in his neck from where he turned his head to not put his face directly into your chest._

_The whippet man tucks his clipboard under his arm and holds his other hand up to snap his fingers, whistling into the open door behind him. A handful of uniformed men emerge to surround your former passenger, tugging at his elbows, pushing at his back to get him moving. They only speak to each other, ignoring him, and you spot Riley's eyes following them, too. You don't recognize their fatigues. Then again, your superiors let you know this was a mission of trust and secrecy. SHIELD goes deep._

_"My men can take him from here," the whippet man says, waving you to the left. "I assume you'd like to have some food and rest before you leave. And we've arranged transportation, so you won't have to rely on, uh—" He flaps his hand at your pack._

_"The EXO-7," you fill in, falling into step beside him, and Riley follows close behind, the only familiar presence in this wasteland of a landscape. You glance back, and the man you rescued is gone, already disappeared into the building. No, taken inside. Disappeared is the kind of language you use for hostages and other victims, and you just brought him home. He's safe now._

_"Ever wonder what happened to EXO-1 through 6?" the whippet man asks with a wry smile, but you don't return it, and he coughs into his hand. "You're brave young men. You're, what, 18?" He looks at Riley. "20-something for you?"_

_"23, actually," you say with your usual sigh, rubbing at your face. Riley snickers, and you shoot a glare his way. The day you get out you're going to grow a goatee and then maybe people will stop thinking you're a kid._

_"Oh, to be so smooth." He opens a door into a different part of the building, and nods. "After you."_

_You make an effort to put the man and his hollow eyes out of your mind. And when that effort isn't enough, you make a bigger one. Time makes the biggest effort of all for you._

 

It's hard when Bucky is like this. Your instinct is to wrap yourself around him, press your body in tight like it can absorb the shakes and the bad feelings; your mother always called you _the huggiest child_. But there are times when that's what Bucky wants, and times when that's what makes Bucky explode, and it's exhausting sometimes trying to figure it out. You think you have it down, though, and you're pretty sure this is one of those times Bucky needs to not be touched. 

It doesn't mean there's no argument, though. 

"I'm not saying I'm ashamed of you. I could never be ashamed of you," you groan, dragging your hand down the side of your face. You wouldn't do it if Bucky weren't facing the kitchen sink. 

"Right. Who'd be ashamed of a killer." That flat affect that means Bucky's moving past upset and heading into shutdown land. "It's just funny that it's you and not me that can't deal with something as stupid as—" 

He can't even finish the sentence. You had some down time, what with no fresh intel coming down the pipe for a while and the day looking sunny and warm, and after rolling around in bed all morning you and Bucky headed out for a nice afternoon. The amnesty bargain let you and Bucky work for SHIELD (born new and pure from its tainted ashes) so long as you obeyed orders, stayed within 100 miles of the edges of Manhattan, and lived on-premises. Natasha is in on the deal, too, and sometimes you get to work with her, but you know she's mostly solo missions. Steve wouldn't, of course, so he's retired. So he says, anyway, but he visits, anyway. 

Bucky seems to think the future is some kind of utopia sometimes, is part of the problem, and there are some borders he just can't see. So one moment, his hand—the warm one, not the carbon fiber replacement SHIELD outfitted him with because they wouldn't have a one-armed operative—was entwined with yours, his thumb rubbing over the back of your hand. The next, as you passed an invisible line into a territory of hard eyes and twisted mouths, you tore your hand from his, stuffing both hands into your pockets. You walked only close enough to suggest that you were hanging out with Bucky, and nothing else. 

"Why, because you're from the past, and the future is a progressive wonderland?" You don't mean to snort with derision but it comes out anyway. 

"I'm not stupid. I know it's not." The carbon fiber hand taps the counter top. "I just thought you wouldn't care about something like that." 

You've tried to explain this to him before, but how do you explain fear of death to someone who's already died, to someone now so hard to kill? 

"It's not about what _I_ care about, it's what other people care about. People with ugliness in their hearts, people with violence on their minds." 

Bucky laughs, a single cold guffaw, and he turns around to face you at last. "Violence? Are you kidding me? They're civilians! You're the Falcon! Even if I wasn't there you could take any stupid piece of shit with something to say!" 

And it's not like he's wrong. It's just so—you never unlearned it. 

"When I was with Riley, back in the day, the whole military complex was still operating under Don't Ask, Don't Tell," you say, holding up your hands as if that'll keep you patient. (It kind of works.) "So we had to keep everything quiet. I remember doing a lot of sneaking around back then." You allow yourself a little smile at the memory, just one side of your mouth tugging upward. 

Bucky scowls, and rests against the edge of the counter. "When was that? Last decade? Two-thousand-something?" 

"Something like that," you say, frowning. 

"Because I remember something, too. I remember Riley, too." 

"What—" 

"You know," he says, keeping his hands on the counter as he leans his upper body forward, "when you and Riley turned me over, back to Hydra?" 

"I don't—" Your face contorts as you try to process his words, and there's something flickering across your mind's eye, a visual tip of the tongue. 

" _We can't thank you enough,_ " Bucky says, in a fair approximation of the whippet man's voice. 

The whippet man. The hollow eyed man, pried off you with secret words. Your lungs snap shut, airless and cold. 

You hadn't thought of that mission in years. You'd _forgotten_ that mission, at first on purpose and then simply losing it to the stream of time. Even when you'd first seen the Winter Soldier, and even when you'd met Bucky properly, you hadn't made the connection, because the Bucky you knew was nothing like the hollow eyed man you'd extracted from where—from where he must have been in hiding, trying to escape, trying to break his own programming in 2001. 

And you'd put him right back in the hands of his torturers. His mutilators. 

You can feel your fingertips going cold, as much as you can't feel the skin of your face anymore, and on some distant planet is the shuffle of Bucky's clothes as he moves toward you. His voice sends out a signal meant for you, but space is vast and you're small, far. 

What yanks you back Earthward, plunging and painful, is Bucky wrapping his arms around you, and you gasp, suddenly finding air again. "That wasn't fair," he murmurs, over and over. "That wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. I'm sorry, Sam, I'm sorry, that wasn't fair, it wasn't—" 

"I'm sorry," you whimper with what's left of your voice. You're complicit. You may as well have flipped the switch on whatever brain blender they used on Bucky yourself. You _helped Hydra._ "I'm so fucking sorry." 

"Shhh," Bucky says, and now he strokes his hand, his right hand, up and down your back with its fiery nerves borne of a panic attack. He doesn't know how much that physically hurts right now, but you let him because you need the intent behind it. "You didn't know. You couldn't have known. I shouldn't have brought it up. I'm sorry, Sam, it wasn't fair that I said it." 

But it doesn't matter if it was fair or not, doesn't matter if you couldn't have known. You shudder in Bucky's arms, think about the actual first time you held him. Taking him back to his doom. The whippet man and his slice of a smile, his whistle for his dogs of war to take Bucky away. The way they would not look at Bucky. 

Hollow eyes. Did you make them that way? 

Bucky takes you into the living room of your SHIELD-appointed apartment, sits down first and draws you like a marionette onto his lap. He kisses your face, gentle closed lips, here and there and here again. "Sam," he says between kisses. "Sam. Sam, Sam, Sam." 

Eventually you slide into a state of calm apathy, where Bucky's touches don't hurt anymore, but it doesn't last because now you're afflicted by the guilt of how selfish this breakdown is. Bucky is the one who was tortured. You're the one who sent him back to fifteen more years of it. You shudder again, and Bucky kisses you again. 

You and Bucky make a strange duality. He never quite knows how to handle your panic attacks because his brain is a mess after being half-destroyed from multiple external sources; your brain is a mess because of genetics and neurochemistry. And war, and watching too many people fall out of the sky, but you still won't put that on the same level as torture. 

Except that Bucky is also about as stubborn as his best friend, which means he won't let you sink into your guilt, keeps interrupting your spirals with affection and your name and inane questions meant to provoke indignant answers out of you. Once he gets your ire up over some stupid pop culture thing you _know_ he understands, that's when you finally see him smiling, and the panic bubble finally pops. Bucky takes you to bed for the second time today, and it's different from the morning because he keeps reminding you how much he loves you, from saying it over and over to the way he never loses bodily contact with you. By the time he falls asleep, smiling against your bare chest, you've finally laughed and it felt so good to let it happen. 

But Bucky falling asleep is like Bucky leaving the room, even as you feel the weight of his exertion-warm body against yours, feel his even breathing under your hands. It leaves you alone with your thoughts, and what that really means is that you're alone with the guilt again, rushing back into the space left by Bucky's receding affection. 

This time, though, you meet it with a resolution. 

In the morning, you check messages from your phone and there's nothing from headquarters. Another day free for the big guns. You have to do it from your phone because Bucky won't let go of you until you're both hungry enough, and then he makes breakfast, a classic American spread like he likes to make on days like this. He didn't used to include grits, and now he makes them with cheddar and lots of cracked pepper. Living with SHIELD can feel like living in a kennel sometimes, but on days like today it feels like an expenses-paid vacation. 

You tell Bucky you're heading out to grab something from the store. He's so trusting of you, even with what he revealed yesterday, that he doesn't ask what you're grabbing from which store. Just reminds you to check that you have your phone, your keys, your wallet. You kiss him goodbye, head outside like he expects. But you don't go to the store. 

The intel you gather over the next few weeks is hard-won, and even harder to keep from your employers. You said, once, that you were more of a soldier than a spy and it shows in how difficult this is for you. You bet if the tables were turned, Bucky would have whatever files and other information needed by yesterday and be on his way to whatever stupid bunker. 

You wonder, always, how much Bucky knows—he always seems to be unaware of your doings, but you've also known him to be a spectacular actor when called upon. You come back home and he doesn't seem terribly worried, just asks if you had fun outside, and you make up some facts about where you went, which at least is easier with your knowledge of the city. Some days you take Bucky out with you to actually just hang out, and you tell yourself it's to maintain your cover. You spend the weekend of Rosh Hashanah just with him, not because he practices but because it reminds him of his mother and because challah is good to share, and is even better with raisins. You know it's also just that intel-gathering is boring and you miss him.

Even if this is all for him. 

The whippet man's name is Markus Priesner, and he's not just any Hydra operative. He was a disciple of Arnim Zola's work, never meeting the man in life—an entire generation spanning the gap between both of theirs—but essentially picking up where Zola left off. He never laid a hand on Bucky, not that you could find out about anyway, but he was always _there_. A clipboard, a scribbling pen, a pair of flashing glasses. A sliver of glinting teeth. 

Better yet, he's in New York, the piece of shit. His secret hiding place, you found out through means better suited to Bucky's style than to yours, is not that far off from Brooklyn Heights. Steve and Bucky's old stomping grounds, way, way, _way_ back in the day. It's deep underground, deeper than the subway, and accessible only through the steam pipes marked off by orange and white striped stacks. Steam pipes that are, by their very nature, painful at best and impossible at worst to navigate for your average human, just as painful and impossible as a single human's odds against the armed guard of an underground Hydra bunker for an evil man waiting out the hunt. 

You have a plan to even the odds, though. And it lies in a vault in SHIELD. 

There was a proposal, once, to create a drug that induced a temporary state of super soldier status. All the strength, speed, pain reduction and even the healing factor of a super soldier, for 48 hours. That was the proposal, anyway. The time got cut to 24 hours, then to 12. By the time the drug was actually manufactured, the expected lasting time was 8 hours. Testing gave it 4. It worked, though. 

It just also proved too costly to make, especially for such a short burst of superhumanity, _especially_ when the operative came out on the other end just as human and injured as they would have without the drug. So the project was shelved, and what little was left of the drug was locked away. 

Good thing there's at least a little bit of spy in you. You steal—no, take, you're an official SHIELD operative now, why shouldn't you be entitled to make use of all its resources?—two tablets, wrap them gently in a paper towel that you put in a sandwich bag that goes in your pocket, where you won't let them stay for long. You only plan on taking one. You just want to make sure you have backup—in case you lose one. 

The rest of what you need is easier to get. Your EXO pack and Falcon suit belong to you, point blank, and you have clearance to the weapons gallery. You wait for Bucky to fall asleep after dinner and TV, slip out slowly and carefully from under his arm. And you have this moment where you stand in the doorway, watching him sleep, wishing you could just crawl back in next to him, but—

You promised yourself, promised him secretly, that you'd do this. For both of you. Flush this vile man out. Bring him back to HQ, that's the plan you keep telling yourself is best. His head is full of probably useful information, as much as you'd like to crack that head open like the rotten egg it is. 

The drug slips under your tongue before you suit up, to give it time to kick in. That's another reason it didn't make it to full production; the four hours include the amount of time it takes to get the user up to full superhumanity. It seems stupid to take your wings underground, but it's a jet pack and a shield, too, and well—it makes you feel safer. More in control. You don't know what you're heading into. 

You don't hit the streets dressed as the Falcon, of course not. Especially not with the arsenal you're bringing along. Instead you take off from SHIELD property, use your goggles to scan below for the entry point while you let the drug overtake you. It feels, ironically enough, kind of like a panic attack, makes your brain feel too alive and your blood feel too hot. Your muscles buzz as you circle an open, steaming manhole in a crosswalk. Brooklyn Heights at two in the morning is not exactly a hot spot, so unless there's someone you don't notice with their face specifically pressed against their window, nobody sees you fold your wings and drop feet-first underground. 

The thing about the steam system is that it's not meant for human locomotion. Your gloves protect your palms from getting full on burns, and the higher pain threshold of the drug is almost wholly kicked in, but you can still feel the heat of the pipes on your hands and knees. The valve is open, too, fogging your goggles and making your lungs feel heavy. But the entrance is near here. You just have to find it. 

Some twenty minutes later, you never thought you'd be so happy to be in a Hydra nest, but at least you get to stand upright, instead of crawling around on a hot, narrow, curved surface. The entrance from the steam pipes put you into some kind of vestibule, nothing but you, the trap door above, and a secure door in front of you, fluorescent light making you slightly ill as it illuminates overpainted concrete walls and floors. You recalibrate your goggles, knocked askew and confused by the steam, and check your pistols. Not that you want to use them first. The main point is to get to Priesner and extract him; all these cannon fodder Hydra agents are afterthoughts. 

SHIELD has come far in terms of blowing the door thanks to embracing Stark ingenuity. (Superior Wakandan ingenuity, unfortunately, is not at their disposal, but they get by.) You set what looks like a charge by the security pad, and instead of an explosion you get a series of quiet beeps. The door clicks just barely open, and you nudge it the rest of the way open with your foot, prying the charge off the door as you pass through. No evidence if you can help it. 

You run into your first guard within sixty seconds of entering the maze of passages that just reminds you of being in a New York public school. It's you who spots him first, though, and you sprint his way before he can return the favor. Your footsteps are heavy because espionage was never your training, and he turns your way, but before he even gets his gun up your knife is in his firing arm, and his fingers spasm as the rifle clatters to the floor. His mouth opens, almost in slow motion, and you slap a palm over it, feel his teeth against your calluses right before you snap his jaw shut too hard. The guard collapses. 

Everything feels like it's vibrating. 

And of course, your attempts to keep him quiet were, in themselves, un-quiet, from the gun falling to the sound of his teeth breaking, which no, you didn't mean to do. This is an extraction. But you can hear shouts from around the corner, and here comes another trio of guards. Their guns are already up, pointing at you. Quiet time is over. 

You rush them, under the line of fire, drive your shoulder into the lower abdomen of the middle guard, and instead of just falling back he goes flying like you hit him with a truck, his gun still firing in an arc at the ceiling, bullets bouncing. Your shoulder is hit, but it's like a gnat to your consciousness, so for all you know it's just a graze. The other two converge and they're like molasses, your two hands reaching for the hot muzzles of their rifles like you're just going for some pull ups at the gym. You yank back, throw the guns over your shoulder, and they go skittering down the hall. Your vision is technicolor as the guards pull knives. One of them is reaching for a walkie. That's the one you need to stop first. 

You reach for the walkie but it's a clumsy grab when you're moving so much faster than you expect. When you wrap your fingers to crush the walkie, you crush the guard's hand, too, a pulp of blood and skin and bone that runs down your gloves. She screams, her pale face suddenly that much paler, but it doesn't stop her, and she swings her knife at you. It's like dodging a toddler. Is this what it feels like for Steve? For Bucky? All of your training is here, sure, it's not like the drug is magic, but you've never been this fast. This strong. It feels as wrong as it feels incredible. 

But the longer you spend with the guards, the more time the whippet man has to be alerted, to possibly get away. You destroyed the walkie before this guard could use it, but it won't be long now. You kick back at the knife coming at you from the other guard, snatch it out of the air as its former wielder hits the wall just next to the very first guard, and jam the butt of it into the forehead of the guard in front of you. She doesn't even gasp as she falls into a heap at your feet, and you look around before she's even done falling. The other two of the trio are unconscious, too, knocked in the head by their you-induced flight. Good enough. You have no time. You take off down the corner they came from. 

Running has never felt like this. You've always kept in relatively good shape but this is god shape, this is legs made of air flicking across a blurry floor, this is lungs that breathe as deeply as on a stroll, surroundings that vanish behind you before you even know they're real. This isn't running. This isn't even flying. This is falling, straight ahead, only moving by your trust in your body. 

More guards. Less time. Ticking down. One of them speaking into a walkie, which means Priesner will be alerted very soon. You unholster both pistols, fire with precision you've never known, and you always thought of yourself as an expert marksman. Guards fall like targets at a shooting gallery game and clear your path but it's not enough, there are _more coming_ , clogging the narrow hall like the cockroaches they are. 

You unhook a smoke grenade from your belt, pull the pin as you run on legs that don't feel like your own, bowl it right into the middle of them. They're smart enough not to fire into it, knowing they might fire at their own numbers, but it doesn't make them _move_ and you turn on the propulsors on the EXO pack as you leap into the air, your wings spread just enough to keep you up. 

Barreling through this many bodies should hurt. It should hurt when your shoulder rams into an upheld knife, when a bullet cracks against your cheekbone on its way past, when one stubborn motherfucker throws his entire self at you at the end of the hallway, anything to slow you down. But it all feels distant, and nothing is going to keep you from the whippet man. Priesner. The stubborn motherfucker meets your body like a deer meeting a speeding car and is gone, under and behind you, before you can even think about him any further. Your brain feels like it's splitting in two, like afterimages. 

There's too much hallway. Too many cockroaches with guns. There's too much of _this place_. It's not just that Priesner might get away, now, it's that the drug might wear off and then you'll bleed out under downtown Brooklyn without anyone knowing where you are. 

But you find the ladder from your intel, your vision narrow and bright, your fingers twitching, your skin flecked and splattered with blood that is and isn't yours. You haven't killed anyone but it's hard, keeping control of this artificial strength. You can feel your various wounds, but your body isn't giving you any other signals about them, no pressing need to do anything about them. You shove aside the limp bodies of the most recent guards you've knocked out, and start your descent. Your foot slips on a rung and you just let yourself slide the rest of the way down, give your propulsors a quick hit before you land out of habit. You don't feel the impact. 

The door at the bottom is set into a vestibule even smaller than the one coming out of the steam system, and this one is locked, too. But by now Priesner must know you're coming. Fuck sneaking, fuck quiet, fuck subtlety. The door has no handle on this side, never meant to be opened from the outside—which means Priesner might already be escaping or escaped via another route—but you dig the fingers of both hands into the steel, which gives less like metal and more like dense rubber, and you wrench back. The door tears from its hinges—still just cheap, standard neighborhood hardware store fare—and clunks against the wall just behind you, revealing the room inside. 

Spare, but livable. A refrigerator. A few pieces of seating. A table. A rug, even. And dead center, facing you with an honest to God rocket launcher clutched in long fingers, is the whippet man. He looks more surprised than you expected. 

Priesner laughs. "I expected—" 

But you don't care who he expected. Faceless guards are a waste of time and violence but you pull a pistol and fire two shots, one into each of Priesner's kneecaps. He screams, crumpling to the unfinished cement, and the rocket launcher falls from his spasming fingers but he reaches for it anyway. 

You stride into the room to kick away the launcher, right as two thuds behind you signal more guards arriving. Where do they keep so many operatives? Priesner rocks back and forth, moaning with the pain of his new immobility, as the freshest Hydra thugs try to take you from behind. This close to your objective you won't be stopped and you give up control of your enhanced body, let yourself pull one arm right out of its socket, feel a leg break under the force of your kick. Priesner manages to drag himself close to the rocket launcher in the middle of the fight and you step on his fingers with your full weight, make him cry out almost as loudly as when you shot him. 

With the guards in yet another unconscious heap made by you, you grab Priesner by the front of his shirt to haul him up, making sure to bump him at least a few times on the way up so he'll really feel those bullet wounds. 

For a moment you just look at him, dangling from your hands with his eyes rolling back and his unbroken hand barely pawing at your wrist. He's wearing jeans that don't fit right, belted in tight, and a plain white T-shirt that got dirty upon your arrival. This was one of the instruments of Bucky's torture, this whippet man with bony shoulders and unwashed hair that only rings the back and sides of his head. Bucky could break him. _You_ could break him, with the drug still running through you, crack his ribs open like a lobster's shell until they came away from the spine. Something morbid like that. 

"If it were the Soldier," the whippet man rasps, with a cough that could be an attempt at laughter, "I would be dead. But you Avengers, you never..." He tries laughing again, and this time there's a hint of a _ha ha ha_. "You never follow through. And now you're trying to undo all our hard work with our soldier to make him the same as you." 

_Our soldier._

You have to bring Priesner back. You can't kill him. You kill him and this turns into a bust, a pointless risk that might even skew in Hydra's favor. 

_Our soldier._

All the times you imagined what Bucky went through. The files you read. The photos. The _nightmares_ you had, of someone else's trauma. Markus Priesner, all over it after 1985. 

Markus Priesner, broken, gasping, hanging from your superhuman fists. The whippet man. 

"I knew you couldn't really do it," he cackles, though his voice is weak. He's egging you on, he has to be, a classic Hydra case of being more loyal to the cause than to his own will to live now that he's caught. _Kill me_ , he's saying. 

_Our soldier._

You should punch his face, first, break his jaw to keep him from saying more shit. But part of you wants him to give you more reasons to hurt him, so you drop him to the floor and hit his shoulder, first. As Sam Wilson, human soldier and hero, you know how to make a punch hurt; as a drug-powered agent of vengeance, you shatter bone and crush nerves, disable his arm completely as he shrieks. You hit the other shoulder and now all he has are two limp strings of flesh. Priesner sobs, saliva threading across his gaping mouth, but he doesn't plead. 

"We always," he pants, his eyes clouded but pointed straight at you, "liked the bottom rungs of the species for subjects. Good irony." Priesner still has enough energy left to twist his mouth with cruel humor. "You would have made a fine soldier for Hydra." 

Your face burns, and it's not with the same shame you felt as a child meeting the ugliness of bigotry for the first time, but the anger of an adult who is tired of that fight. You know exactly what he's getting at, _bottom rungs_. You also know he still wants you to kill him, because with no limb function left and no Hydra agents to save him, he's never getting away from you. 

You read, in the research you were able to comprehend on the drug's effects, that the operative would know when the clock was ticking. You feel it now, the shakes getting more violent in your forearms, your thighs, your shoulders. Your body is starting to remember what pain is like, still a distant memory but closing in. You're deep underground and you didn't think this through, you were so fucking hell bent on vengeance for Bucky and peace for both of you that you didn't think about dragging a severely injured man up through the cramped steam system and onto street level, all while injured yourself, and then what? Call SHIELD and wait at the bus stop for extraction, bleeding all over the sidewalk? You've run through so much of this complex at speeds you don't even comprehend that you don't even know what part of New York you're under anymore. You might not even be under Brooklyn anymore. You might be underwater. 

Priesner is still mumbling insults and obscenities, even with obvious tear trails down his pallid face, and you punch him in the jaw at last, skewing it ugly to one side. Enough of that. You can't deal with getting out _and_ him. He's still not silent, just one long guttural _aaahhhhh_ that wavers in volume, but that much you can tune out. You look up at the ceiling. 

If you _are_ underwater, and you punch a hole through the ceiling—ceilings?—with your wrist rocket, you could get up the ladder, swim if you're not fast enough, but the hallway above would probably flood completely before you could find the exit, and that's _with_ Priesner's nearly-dead weight dragging you down. No way in hell you'd survive. 

SHIELD communicator. Call for extraction, dummy. Except you pull it out, a hardy little piece of straightforward tech much smaller than a phone, and even that's cracked. Maybe when that stubborn motherfucker bounced off you in flight. Thanks, Tony. You pinch your nose at the bridge and sigh, tucking the broken communicator back where it belongs. Priesner watches you from the floor, wiggling with obvious delight at your frustration even through his pain. You give him a solid kick to the solar plexus, like right in the fucking guts, and he doubles over, no more delight. 

Whatever. You stand as good a chance of blowing a hole to daylight as you do to the bottom of the East River, especially when you're decently sure all these hallways have been leading you further east. If you can get through the ceiling, you can—you hope—use Priesner's rocket launcher to make the rest of your escape route. Firing the big rocket first would just kill you now if it bounced or misfired, and you'd like to at least give yourself a few extra minutes of life. 

You gather Priesner to your side, ignoring his caterwauling, and look at the ceiling again. You have to take a moment to let your eyes re-focus, and then re-focus again, and then a third time once you've got your wrist rocket lined up, but you're doing this. You're making this happen. 

"Yyuh unn eye, weh nna eye," Priesner says from your arm, and you shake him, make him subside back into pitiful moaning. 

You fire the rocket. Debris rains down on your head, but when you look back up, there's no hole. This nest is dug deep, and its walls are thick. You should have known a mini rocket wouldn't have been enough. Priesner starts up again, a slurring laugh even after you hurl him to the floor. You're tired of being alone with him. "You think that's funny?" you growl as you drag one of the three chairs under the dent in the ceiling your rocket made. "Laugh at this, you piece of shit." 

The ceiling is low, and when you stand on the chair it's easy to set every charge you brought with you. Every last one. You overpacked on purpose, not wanting to leave yourself unprepared in unfamiliar enemy territory even when you didn't plan on needing explosives. You glance over your shoulder as you work to setting the charges to two minutes apiece, clustering them around the damage you dealt to the ceiling before, and you smirk to see how unhappy Priesner looks. He talked so much about you not being able to kill him but with death being slapped up against the ceiling and counting down, looks like he might want to live after all. 

Not that you have complete—or any—certainty that you'll survive this setup. The ceiling sure fucking won't. You jump down, kicking the chair to the wall as you do, and kneel over Priesner, extend your wings. They only offer so much protection, and you hate to protect him, but you curl them around you until they make a shield over your heads, and listen to the charges tick down. 

"He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty," you whisper, your mouth gone dry with the dehydration of the drug's comedown. Priesner looks unimpressed but it's not for him. "I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust." You haven't gone to church of your own accord in so long but with death hanging over you in every sense you think of your mother, and it's her that speaks through you as you pray. 

"Surely He will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his feathers," you continue, tightening your wings just one iota more. The beeps of the explosives are picking up speed. "And under His wings you will find refuge; His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. You will not fear the terror of night—" 

The charges blow. 

Pain rips through your back and your hips, but you know you can still move, and when the dust is on its way to settling you stand, snatch the rocket launcher from the floor and aim up. You fire. You keep praying. The rocket goes, making the room tremble and filling it with more debris, but it doesn't come back. That's all you can hope for right now. 

You switch your goggles to night vision, and pick up Priesner with both arms like a toddler picking up a cat. Your wings are damaged but not enough to stop you from flying, and with propulsion at 100% you blast off into the gaping hole where there used to be a ceiling. Night vision is more like nightmare vision to your darkening eyesight, but it gives you enough to go by. You can only trust the next few feet in front of you, trust that the rocket ate through enough of the earth below the streets of Brooklyn to get you out of this death trap. 

There's light. There's _light_. It's dim, and between the goggles and the drug wearing off you can't even tell if it's daylight but it means the rocket didn't just sputter out and get lodged in the bedrock. It grows by the second, and so do your pain levels, but you're getting out, you're going to fucking _live_. 

You burst through the top of the rocket-made tunnel, your wings spreading wide for balance, right onto the grimy outer tracks of Hoyt-Schermerhorn station. 

The first place you look is up. That's where you find what's left of the rocket, lodged in a huge crater in the ceiling of the station, which means it didn't make it to the street, which means that coming out this far to the side of the station, it didn't hurt anyone. You're so grateful you close your eyes for just a moment. 

The second place you look is at Priesner. He's completely unconscious. Not an immediate problem. 

The third place you look is directly into the flashlight of the blue collar cop on the edge of one of the center platforms, which are already cleared of civilians. The brightness makes you cry out, staggering in the filth of the tracks. You can feel your blood loss acutely now, feel every place where Hydra agents opened your body up with bullet and blade. 

The fourth place you look is up again, and that's because you're falling, your legs giving up right before your head does, Priesner slipping from your grasp. The last thing you hear before you lose consciousness is the stomping of many feet, and in particular, one heavy body dropping into the tracks next to you. The last thing you feel is a hand under your head, narrowly keeping you from hitting it against the tracks. 

You wake up, and everything is bright. Everything smells chemical, clean and harsh. Hospital, then. SHIELD hospital wing, more likely. Your employers are very proprietary like that. You're hooked up, stitched up, bandaged up. You'd say the morphine drip you're on might be why you're not out of your mind with agony. 

Within seconds of waking, Bucky raises his head, because now you notice he's dragged a chair all the way up to the side of your bed, and your hand is sandwiched between both of his. He looks haggard, and the smile he gives you is weary. 

"You know, it used to be Steve was the boneheaded martyr out of all of us," Bucky says, as he rubs the back of your hand, just shy of the needle of the IV drip. "What happened, Steve retired and you felt a burning need to take his place?" 

He's right, though. What you did was stupid. A boneheaded martyr move, indeed. You turn your face away, and Bucky lets go of you so he can put gentle fingers to your jaw and turn it back. "Hey," he says, nearly a whisper. "This was about what I said last month, wasn't it?" 

A yes no question. You can do that much, so you nod. 

"Did you do this for me?" His thumb brushes over your cheek, over and over again. The carbon fiber one. You remember he didn't really want the arm, but SHIELD insisted. Now he tries to be positive about it, says two hands gives him double the opportunity to touch you. Like he tries to be positive about a lot of things. 

You shake your head. "I did this for us." It might have felt like it was for Bucky at first, but you know it was as much for your own heart as it was to avenge Bucky. Your voice sounds ugly on the way out, and you wonder how long you've been out. 

Bucky's face does a lot of things in a short amount of time. There's confusion, there's some kind of serious glare that only lasts for a second, there's concern; there's lip-biting, there's his tongue sliding over the backs of his front teeth in hesitation. "I just—you didn't have to, Sam. Not for this half of us, anyway," he says, gesturing to himself. He takes your hand between his again. "I..." Bucky swallows. "I've had that memory for a long time. I've forgiven you, for a long time. You couldn't have known." 

You frown, just a little bit, which is how you find out just how numb your face feels. "You didn't tell me?" 

"I didn't see any reason to tell you." He raises your hand to his lips, presses them there. It took him a long time to work up to being this openly affectionate with you, and then it was all you could do to keep him off you in inappropriate moments. (You know, like the very argument that started this whole mess.) "I fucked up when I told you at all. I was being—" A regretful smile flashes across his face. "I was being shitty." 

You can't explain to him why you had to do this. Not when you're full of waning morphine and barely able to move. He follows the motion when you fumble for the button to give yourself a morphine boost, and his eyebrows twitch up. "Maybe we can talk about this later," he admits, and you laugh at him through your nose. 

"See, we're just two boneheads in a bone pod," you say, reaching up to try and flick him gently in the forehead and missing by a solid six inches. Bucky catches your hand and returns it to your stomach with a laugh. 

Later on, you'll find out Priesner survived your brutality, and that he's slated for interrogation once all the damage you did is at least half-healed. Later on, you'll have nightmares about being trapped in a lightless tunnel with no end and no way to go back. You'll see that one agent's pulped hand, and you'll dream she did it to you. You'll dream you did it to Bucky, and Bucky will wake you, show you his two hands, let you hold the one made of bone and blood and feel how whole it is. Later on, you'll hold that same hand as Bucky looks in on Priesner's interrogation, his face bloodless with rage and fear. 

But for now, Bucky does his level best to scoot the hospital chair even closer to the bed, and he lays his head on your uninjured shoulder. With one hand you sweep his hair out of his face, over and over, despite how lank it is with how long he must have waited for you to wake up, and with the other you simply hold his hands over your stomach. "Don't you ever fucking pull something like this again," Bucky whispers into your hospital gown. "I love you, Sam." 

"Yeah, me too," you mumble, the morphine boost already making you drowsy again. So much for being up and at 'em. 

"Excuse me?" he snorts. 

"I said yeah, I love you too," you say, and Bucky raises his head just enough to collect a kiss from you. 

"That's what I thought," he chuckles, nestling his head back into place. 

You fall asleep, but between Bucky and the morphine, there are no nightmares. Only warmth and love.

**Author's Note:**

> bluh last lines. whatever first draft last draft get it out the door (and it's not that bad i don't think)
> 
> @shipthroughthepages i know this isn't fully what you had in mind but i hope it delivered anyway! and to new readers, you can come hang out with me on [tumblr](http://softsams.tumblr.com/)!


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